Early this year, Burger King made waves with a "Whopper Sacrifice" Facebook app.  Google, meanwhile, has achieved Twitter omnipresence with 87 official accounts.  But not every company has tons of free hamburgers and/or employees lying around, so a like-named session at SES Chicago addressed the matter of "Social Media for the Little Guy."

Update 2: Here is our exlcusive interview with Technorati CEO Richard Jalichandra from the BlogWorld Expo this past weekend:

An interesting topic was discussed at the BlogWorld Expo in a session called the "Death and Rebirth of Journalism," which WebProNews attended.

Technorati has launched a new version of its site. Among the changes is a feature that lets users post content directly to the site. This pretty much gives authors a chance to promote their blogs with links from their profile pages, while giving Technorati itself some unique content.

Blogger has extended the comments feature it annoucned last year, which lets users embed comments and the commenting form below blog posts. The feature has been extended to display profile images next to comments that blog visitors write.

Google News is now labeling certain publications as blogs in search results. I’m not sure exactly how long it has been like this, but I noticed it for the first time today. In the past they have separated "news" and "blogs" on some results pages, but in what I’m talking about now, the results are mixed together, but some publications have "(blog)" written beside their names.

You can see a few examples here:

Today Six Apart, the makers of TypePad, released a new TypePad PubSubHubub hub, which automatically promotes blog updates in real time. It’s a free feature for bloggers who use TypePad, and it automatically updates Google Reader, FriendFeed, SuperFeedr, and LiveDoor.

You would almost think blogging was dead, the way headlines are dominated by Twitter, Facebook, and social media in general. I’ve always considered blogging to be a part of social media anyway, as the commenting factor lends to engagement between author and user.

Comments on blogs posts and articles have in the past generally been a good measurement of how people have engaged with content, but as the web becomes more social and "real-time," the conversation is going all over the place, and there are other ways that people are engaging in conversation about content (this is why shareability is so important by the way).

Obeying a court order and revealing the identity of a formerly anonymous blogger might not work out so well for Google.  Rosemary Port, who was exposed as the author of the now infamous "Skanks in NYC" blog, has said that she intends to sue the search giant for $15 million.

A little more than one month ago, we discussed how Google was asking regular people to give their thoughts about the National Broadband Plan.  Now, the FCC’s doing something similar, with a fresh blog and Twitter account apparently intended to reach out to the public.

Tending to a website can take a lot of time and energy, and the people who run them deserve nothing but applause.  At the same time, though, blogs and RSS feeds can really benefit an SEO campaign, and so a session at SES San Jose focused on how and why to incorporate them.

Coverage of the SES San Jose conference continues at WebProNews Videos.  Stay with WebProNews for more notes and videos from the event this week.

It’s been eight months since TechCrunch announced that they would no longer honor embargoes, with several other sites jumping on that bandwagon in the interim. One of the issues here was undermining the credibility of the blogosphere at large. As Trisha Lyn Fawver put it,

Companies have long had problems putting numbers on social media marketing results. Wetpaint and the Altimeter Group have now released a study looking at how engagement with consumers through social media correlates with financial performance.

A number of people have noticed that Google is viewing their websites as blogs when they are not really blogs. They are finding that Google is placing them in blog search portions of universal search results in regular Google searches.

Collecta, a new search engine, launched today with a unique twist… they’re one of the first real-time search engines.

Searching with Collecta, you get real-time results from blogs, Twitter, Flickr, YouTube, social sites and various news outlets.